Physical and verbal abuse, psychosocial difficulties, and social media and gaming addiction among school-aged children and adolescents: A large-scale study.

BACKGROUND

Childhood maltreatment is a recognized risk factor for digital addiction among adolescents. However, the differential pathways linking specific abuse subtypes to distinct forms of digital addiction through multiple psychosocial mechanisms remain underexplored.

OBJECTIVE

Guided by general strain theory, this study examined the parallel mediating roles of four dimensions of psychosocial difficulties (e.g., emotional symptoms, conduct problems, inattention, and peer relationship problems) in the associations between physical and verbal abuse and social media addiction and gaming addiction.

PARTICIPANTS AND

SETTING

Participants were 11,638 school-aged children and adolescents (aged 10-18 years; 53.1% male) recruited from six public schools in Chongqing, China, using cluster sampling.

METHODS

Structural equation modeling was used to test a parallel mediation model accounting for measurement error and intercorrelations among mediators, with age and sex included as covariates. Bootstrapped confidence intervals were used to evaluate indirect effects.

RESULTS

Emotional symptoms significantly mediated the associations between both physical abuse (β = 0.032, 95% CI [0.020, 0.044]) and verbal abuse (β = 0.122, 95% CI [0.095, 0.149]) and social media addiction. Inattention was the primary mediator linking both physical abuse (β = 0.071, 95% CI [0.022, 0.120]) and verbal abuse (β = 0.189, 95% CI [0.087, 0.291]) to gaming addiction. Conduct problems and peer relationship problems showed no significant independent mediating effects. Sensitivity analyses revealed a suppression effect, whereby the direction of the association between emotional symptoms and gaming addiction reversed when other psychosocial dimensions were simultaneously modeled.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings demonstrate differentiated strain pathways from child abuse to specific forms of digital addiction and highlight the importance of simultaneously modeling multidimensional psychosocial difficulties in intervention design.